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Pivotal, Google Cloud at Center of Recent VMware Collaboration

VMworld 2017 day two began with announcements including Google and Pivotal collaboration and updated features for Workspace ONE

August 29, 2017 - LAS VEGAS—VMworld 2017 day two started with VMware announcing its collaboration with Pivotal and Google Cloud on the Pivotal Container Service (PKS).

PKS allows enterprises and service providers to deliver Kubernetes on VMware vSphere and Google Cloud Platform with compatibility to Google Container Engine (GKE).

"Acquiring the technical capabilities and the transformative culture associated with modern software companies is a matter of competitive urgency for most enterprises,” Pivotal CEO Rob Mee said in a statement. “To adapt, organizations need to provide their developers modern application development platforms to enable them to ship code continuously."

Dig Deeper

PKS is built to help organizations operationalize Kubernetes. Kubernetes is an open source system for automating deployment, scaling, and management of container applications.

Once organizations have decided to deploy containers, PKS will assist them in in delivering maintainable platform that gives developers access to a highly available and production ready environment.

PKS is expected to be available in Q4 and will feature Kubernetes via BOSH, VMware NSX, and a version of Open Services Broker API that was jointly developed among the partners. The API integrates Google Cloud services into PKS applications.

PKS will also feature cross cloud security and network connectivity and integrate with vSphere.

PKS also gives users constant compatibility to Google Container Engine powered by Kubernetes for full management.

"We see an open hybrid cloud ecosystem forming based on many technologists and providers coming together on Kubernetes, and Pivotal Container Service is a great way to run containers and Kubernetes on premises," Google Cloud VP of Product Management, Developer Platforms Sam Ramji said in a statement. "It gives you native access to Google Cloud services, and it's on the same release cadence as Google Container Engine. With Pivotal Container Service plus Google Container Engine, you get constant compatibility, and your services, and workloads are deployed the same way, anywhere you need them."

The partnership among these three companies represents the ongoing theme of collaboration among vendors at VMworld 2017.

In the day two keynote address, VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger said that customer demand drove these joint efforts. Customers want tools that are compatible with the many different vendor solutions deployed within their IT infrastructure.

New Workspace ONE features

VMware also announced its unified end user experience, management, and security solution features that have been added to Workspace ONE.

Workspace ONE users can now utilize Workspace ONE as a single solution to enable unified endpoint management to unify end user experiences across all endpoint platforms. The new features integrate all endpoint platforms (ie; Chrome OS, MacOS, iOS, Android, Windows) using their provided APIs.

"The modern workforce is stretching the limits of IT as employees embrace cloud and mobile technologies to perform work throughout the day using a growing variety of endpoints and platforms," VMware Senior Vice President and General Manager of End-User Computing Sumit Dhawan said in a statement. "Partnering with major endpoint platform providers gives us the ability to deliver a modern unified solution that enables our customers to break free from silo-ed management stacks and user experiences."

The Workspace ONE updates are expected to become available in Q3 FY18.